"Pythagoras, Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers believed that the planets and stars moved in such a way that they produced music. They did not understand planetary orbits as we do today – using concepts like obliquity and orbital eccentricity – but instead conceived of the heavens as divided into different levels of concentric spheres, through which the planets and stars moved.The theory proposed that each sphere was determined by properties corresponding to ontological musical forms, many of which Pythagoras had a hand in discovering: the speed of the spheres’ movement corresponded to pitch and the distances between them to intervals (octaves, fourths, fifths), similar to notes played on an instrument’s string. So, as they moved, the spheres sounded notes innate to their forms and harmonized with each other. That music, mathematics and the cosmos are not only linked but also resonate with each other in a constitutional interconnectedness is a cornerstone of Pythagorean and Platonic thought. This idea has not been completely disproven, either – massive objects in space-time, like black holes, have been shown to bend gravitational waves, effectively producing enough vibration to ring through the nothingness of space.

Astrology is a language. It makes meaning from how cosmological orbits, events and cycles affect what happens on Earth; an astrologer learns this and then becomes a close reader of it. As with any language, its expressive potential is at once limitless and idiosyncratic. It becomes infused with the spirit of the moment: it can be bent to nefarious uses, stained by trends and ideologies, and its capacity and facility for observation can turn it into a mirror dirtied by what it reflects. Astrology is a body of knowledge engendered by the encounter between the scientific rigour of astronomy and the interpretative and poetic framework of literature. Hence, it is not a summarizing, reductive system. It branches and fractals. It must be capacious enough to hold doom and disaster in the same mill as the mundane: papercuts and car wrecks, a lost text message and a thrown election.

One of the things I love about astrology is its complexity. It’s an exercise in the explicative, compounded with a gnostic shimmering. Although astrology has a solid foundation in quantitative phenomena – counting hours, days, seasons, years; calculating when convergences will occur between orbits – I like to stress the qualitative engine of it. How exactly is night different from day? Summer from winter? Astrology is not a picture of your personality, or at least, not the kind I prefer. It’s all the planetary bodies, fixed stars and ecliptic calculations, each in its specific orbit, together at any given moment, and what all this might mean – then it changes from one moment to the next.

To the ancients, an astrology chart mapped where all the gods were at any given moment. Astrology, by a few millennia, predates the invention of the psychological self, and I prefer this more ancient framework. To me, the heart of reading astrology pumps the blood of causality, moving according to a maybe-detectable telos – how each god’s condition affected what was happening on Earth.

If chewing on the word ‘god’ makes your mouth itch, try replacing it with ‘fate’. If the singularity of ‘fate’ keeps you from falling asleep, try making it plural. If the multiplicity in the concept of ‘the fates’ sizzles in your limbs and makes you fidget, light a white candle in the morning and blow it out at night. When you light the candle, it can help to ring a bell at the same time. It can be a small bell, tucked into your palm. It’s okay if no one else can hear it".

Hedva